Medical Law

The question whether assisted dying (euthanasia and assisted suicide) should be legalized is often treated, by judges and commentators alike, as a question which transcends national boundaries and diverse legal systems. One obvious example is the use made of the ‘Dutch experience’ in other jurisdictions. By treating the issue as a transcendent, global ethical question, the important context in which individual jurisdictions make decisions about assisted dying and the significance of the legal methods chosen to carry out those decisions is often lost. This book concentrates not on the issue of whether assisted dying should be legalized, but rather on the impact of the choice of a particular legal route towards legalization. Legal change on assisted dying may be achieved in a variety of ways: challenges to criminal prohibitions using constitutionally entrenched rights; the use of defences available to defendants who are prosecuted for assisting a death; legislative change; or referenda or ballot measures proposed by individual citizens or interest groups. The examination in this book of the impact of these different alternatives suggests that greater caution is needed before relying on the experience of one jurisdiction when discussing proposals for regulation of assisted dying in others, and the possible consequences of such regulation. The book seeks to demonstrate the need to explore the legal environment in which assisted dying is performed or proposed in order to evaluate the relevance of a particular legal experience to other jurisdictions.

This book examines aspects of English, United States, Canadian, and Australian law as it applies to the fetus, the pregnant woman, and the doctor or midwife who provides antenatal and perinatal care. A major part of the book consists of a critical examination of the law’s attempts to protect the fetus, which is threatened by conduct such as a criminal assault, maternal drug-taking, or parental refusal of medical treatment. The remainder of the work deals with the rapidly expanding and increasingly complex body of law on the liability of obstetricians, general practitioners, and midwives when negligent antenatal or perinatal care has been provided. There are numerous situations in which these health care professionals (or their employees) can be liable to pay damages. They can be sued if their negligence has harmed the mother, caused the birth of an injured, disabled, or stillborn child, or has resulted in the birth of an unwanted child. The book provides a comprehensive statement of the law on antenatal intervention to protect the fetus and on the responsibilities of those who care for pregnant women. By examining the nature of the relationship between a pregnant woman and her fetus, and the operation of child protection and criminal laws and the law of negligence, the book explores questions about maternal autonomy, the rights of the woman and the fetus, and the role of the law in protecting those rights and providing compensation when something goes wrong.

Health is a matter of fundamental importance in European societies, both as a human right in itself, and as a factor in a productive workforce and therefore a healthy economy. New health technologies promise improved quality of life for patients suffering from a range of diseases, and the potential for the prevention of incidence of disease in the future. At the same time, new health technologies pose significant challenges for governments, particularly in relation to ensuring the technologies are safe, effective, and provide appropriate value for (public) money. To guard against the possible dangers arising from new health technologies, and to maximize the benefits, all European governments regulate their development, marketing, and public financing. In addition, several international institutions operating at the European level, in particular the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the European Patent Office, have become involved in the regulation of new health technologies. They have done so both through traditional ‘command and control’ legal measures, and through other regulatory mechanisms, including guidelines, soft law, ‘steering’ through redistribution of resources, and private or quasi-private regulation. This book analyses European law and its relationships with new health technologies. It uses interdisciplinary insights, particularly from law but also drawing on regulation theory, and science and technology studies, to shed new light on some of the key defining features of the relationships and especially the roles of risk, rights, ethics, and markets. The book explores the way in which European law's engagement with new health technologies is to be legitimized, and discusses the implications for biological or biomedical citizenship.

This book assesses the fragmentation of the U.S. health care system in chapters by the nation's leading professors in law, medicine, economics, health, business, and political science. The book demonstrates the extent of fragmentation among doctors who treat individual patients, even within single hospitals, and the even worse fragmentation that exists over time and across patients. The book further shows that this fragmentation leads to increased medical error, higher costs, less preventive care, and misallocations of health care resources. It identifies possible causes of fragmentation, including laws that mandate separate payments for each provider, restrict hospitals or others from controlling or rewarding the set of providers treating a patient to assure coordinated care, and provide affirmative disincentives for coordinating care by paying more for uncoordinated care that requires more services. Finally, the book examines and proposes reforms that could make our health care system less fragmented, more efficient, and more effective. The book and its proposals are particularly well-timed because the U.S. will have to consider these problems and how best to ameliorate them as the U.S. considers how best to implement its new health care statute.

This is a book for anyone who has ever paused to wonder: Will cloning ever be legal? Why it is that ‘saviour siblings’ and sex selection provoke such strong reactions? Will there ever be such a thing as an artificial womb? Assisted reproductive technologies are unique in their capacity to challenge our assumptions and elicit passionate responses. Looking at the moral, philosophical, and legal issues surrounding cases of surrogacy, single or same-sex parenthood, retrieval of sperm from dead or dying patients, and the insemination of post-menopausal women, this book questions whether these rapidly-developing technologies are refashioning the nature of the family. The UK has played a unique role in the development and regulation of reproductive technologies, and has been at the forefront of controversy over ‘saviour siblings’, designer babies, reproductive cloning, and embryo research. This book provides a clear and simple account of the techniques involved in assisted reproduction and embryo research, and discusses the legal and ethical implications of some of these technologies, illustrated by compelling descriptions of real-life cases. The book also addresses the ways in which reproductive technologies are regulated, critically examining the role of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and comparing the UK's approach with that of other countries. Finally, it contemplates the possibility that some of our most deeply-held assumptions about human nature may be called into question by further developments in stem cell research and fertility treatments.

This book offers a comprehensive legal and ethical analysis of the most interesting and broadest reaching development in health care of the last twenty years: its globalization. This book ties together the manifestation of this globalization in four related subject areas—medical tourism, medical migration (the physician “brain drain”), telemedicine, pharmaceutical research and development—and integrates them in a philosophical discussion of issues of justice and equity relating to the globalization of health care. Medical tourism and telemedicine are growing, multi-billion-dollar industries affecting large numbers of patients. Estimates show that more than 400,000 patients (50,000 of whom were American) sought treatment at a single facility in Thailand in 2005. The U.S. heavily depends on foreign-trained doctors to staff its health care system; as of 2005, a fifth of all doctors practicing in the United States were believed foreign trained. This recruitment has had serious effects on the supply of doctors in the developing world; for example, between 1986 and 1995, 61% of all graduates of the Ghana Medical School left their country for employment. Forty percent of clinical trials are now run in the developing world, with indications of as much of a 10-fold increase in the past twenty years, and NGOs across the world are agitating for increased access to necessary pharmaceuticals in the developing world they claim would save millions from early death at a relatively low cost. Coming on the heels of the most expansive reform to U.S. health care in fifty years, this book also produces an intricate map for some of the leading thinkers in the field to plot the ways in which this globalization will develop as the reform is implemented.

This book deals with the following controversial issues in Jewish Law: abortion, assisted reproduction, genetics, the obligation to heal, patient autonomy, treatment of the terminally ill, the definition of death, organ donations, and the allocation of scarce medical resources. The book focuses upon the complex interplay between legal and moral elements in the decision-making process, particularly when questions of life and death (such as abortion and treatment of the terminally ill) are involved. The author argues that the moral element in Jewish biomedical law is of a universal, rational nature, and its theoretical basis may be located in a weak form of Natural law theory regarding the value of human life in the Jewish legal tradition. The concept of patient autonomy in Jewish biomedical law is more limited than in contemporary liberal jurisprudence, and is based upon theological as well as strictly legal elements. The influence of scientific thinking upon the decision-making process in Jewish biomedical law is illustrated in a discussion of the contemporary debate concerning the permissibility of heart transplants. In most chapters, Jewish law is compared and contrasted with Canon and Common Law, and the volume also discusses the role played by Jewish biomedical law in modern, secular Israeli law. In this context, it addresses the thorny issue of combining religious law with democratic principles within the framework of a secular legal system.

This book is the latest volume in the Current Legal Issues series, which is based upon an annual colloquium held at University College London. Each year, leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought. Each colloqium examines how the external discipline is conceived in legal thought and argument, how the law is pictured in that discipline, and analyses points of controversy in the use, and abuse, of extra-legal arguments within legal theory and practice. Law and Bioethics contains a broad range of essays by scholars of law, medicine, biosciences, and philosophy interested in the interactions between law and bioethics. It includes topical studies examining the regulation of stem cell research, human rights and bioethics, the regulation of reproductive technologies, and distributive justice in healthcare and pandemic planning. This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of legal theory, moral philosophy, medical law, bioethics, and medical ethics.

The book explains the principle of the sanctity or inviolability of human life and its continuing relevance to English law governing aspects of medical practice at the beginning and end of life. It shows that the principle, though widely recognized as an historic and foundational principle of the common law, has been widely misunderstood, not least in the legal academy, at the Bar and on the Bench. Part I of the book identifies the confusion and clarifies the principle, distinguishing it from “vitalism” on the one hand and a “qualitative” evaluation of human life on the other. Part II addresses legal aspects of the beginning of life, including the history of the law against abortion and its relevance to the ongoing abortion debate in the US; the law relating to the “morning after” pill; and the legal status of the human embryo in vitro. Part III addresses legal aspects of the end of life, including the euthanasia debate; the withdrawal of tube-feeding from patients in a “persistent vegetative state”; and the duty to provide palliative care.

This book, the third volume in the Current Legal Issues series, provides a treatment of an area that will stimulate and enlighten anyone interested in law and medicine. This book considers the many areas where medicine intersects with the law. Advances in medical research, reproductive science, and genetic research give rise to ethical and legal issues that are well known. These are reflected in chapters on cloning, organ donation, choosing genetic characteristics, and the use of Viagra. At the same time changes in health care funding call into question the rights of patients, whilst a rise in medical negligence litigation calls into question the doctor’s duty of care. What rights will patients have in a privately funded health service and what room is there for the patient’s right to choose or refuse treatment in such a system? The changing structure of health care is in the government’s hands comes whilst the supply of technology and drugs flows unregulated by market forces. In the future clashes between what can be done and what ought to be done will be increasingly referred to the courts. All of these important and changing facets of law and medicine are reflected in this book.